Oh hey, I did’t see you there. There have been no postings yet. This is my 3rd or 4th blog but who is counting. Some of those posts may appear here. In the meantime, the easiest way to check me out is on twitter as @NiceCrow1 or @robcrowe00. But be careful out there: The internet is full of off-ramps to NOWHERE. Or Now Here.
The Hollow Men of the Left
I read and enjoy Jacobin from time to time, as I do the n+1, and the Baffler. All are Gen-X, and early Millenial founded little magazines that dispense rouge critique in regular installments, usually in broad Marxist or Cynical tones. They are not militant in practice, which would require theorizing a party that leads a movement, but they are militant in rhetoric. The broadest brush or the most tendentious reading of the Situation is what they specialize. We hear and often agree with the exaggerations, we can get fired up and shouty about them, but when the blood pressure drops and the journal goes back on the shelf, a lot of the analysis seems off the cuff and overdrawn. This article is a good instance. The writer instances some proposed or possibly instituted laws against protest that are “draconian.” That rather oversells what are, usually, little blips of proposals that will not even get a hearing in a committee, let alone pass state or national constitutional muster. Even some of the most egregious acts of state violence (hint: not violent in a physical sense) against activist are ephemeral: journalists have been wildly overcharged but not indicted in DAPL. It needs to be said, since there are actual victims (or volunteers) of actual state violence in prison from crackdowns on other left actions from long ago: Peltier and Abu-Jamal spring to mind. In the radical imaginary, we live in an increasingly “carceral” and “panoptic” state, but in actual fact, there is no Cointelpro, there are no water cannons, there is no systematic infiltration of a political party that was presumed (not entirely without cause) to envision the nonlegislative overthrow of the government (and was allied with a foreign power as the CP-USA was. There was not quite an inverse relationship in the late 60s, as the Weatherman certainly discerned a revolutionary “moment” to match their rhetoric and praxis, but in practical terms, it is safer to be militant (in terms of organizing demonstrations and written and oral expression) in the US in more places and more causes than ever.
The response, again informed by Marx, Foucault and Cynical Reason is that people have been pacified into submission. A lovely phrase, which I wish would be rehabilitated, since it does describe some current phenomenon, is Marcuse’s “repressive desublimazation”. Realizing pleasure itself is an indication of our repression. Pleasure often takes the form of self-soothing–that Law & Order marathon quiets those voices as much as anything–so it certainly does dispel the urge to shout. But to generalize this as the entire predicament of the 300 million or so people in this country is, on some very basic level, what a 14 year old boy would, perhaps one who holes up and listens to nothing but hardcore or derivative speed metal. It becomes a form of self-soothing itself, though it certainly resonate with a broader audience. But it simply does not describe the actual political situation we find ourselves in. In its most melodramatic moments, Marxism has never described the US very well. Our radical tradition has roots in a pastoral republicanism that was uninformed about how urban that tradition (Harrington, Milton) was in its English home. While there is certainly a class system, with verbal and cultural markers, it certainly is not as stable as the verities of the British upper class. Foucault on the other hand wrote out of a French situation where the State (or the Federal Government) has a hand in everything: this is the country in which one King said, L’etat, c’est moi. Cynicism is simply cynicism; to certain minds, to paint everything black is funnier or more radical. The Baffler at its start had two writers and activists that specialized in relentless negativity, Thomas Frank and Steve Albini. Both are relatively middle class and white and identified with Chicago and the Midwest. A part of me what to say that the pose is indebted to some degree to Midwestern sarcasm, and a distrust of elites since they are all pictured as people who live on the coasts.
The pose is wearying, wherever it comes from. it certainly derives to from the superiority of literary and cultural theory, and the rules of evidence sometimes seem to have come from our neck of the woods as well. In its origin from the English Department, literary and cultural critique is fundamentally rhetorical. This is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient. In rhetorical critique, what matters are the words and the unsaid and most of all demonstrating that the subject is not aware of what they are saying. There is plenty of reason to do this now, but it also becomes like shooting fish in a barrel. Take the Baffler here: the most obvious point is that the Republican Party has no Brown Shirts, SS or SAs, either at the state or federal level. They do not even have an armed guard obviously answerable to the President as Erdogan does. Rhetorically the Party may traffic in authoritarian signaling, and said signaling does indeed matter to the base. (One begins to wonder if that is all they want, when it comes down it. Freedom to spleen.) But by a stricter and shall we say “materialist” analysis, we would have to call that rhetoric “hollow”.
Thus, to reciprocate in kind, to as it were, respond by politicizing aesthetics as Benjamin and Brecht advocated in a much different time, is engage in equally hollow rhetoric. A certain tone of apocalypse is in the american grain. When the Declaration was made, the world had never seen such a thing: it was a Monstrosity, even if by the 18th century, we can see as a small local struggle in the amidst a much longer European clash of titans (Spain, France, England, Russia) that began somewhere in the 1750 and ended perhaps in 1815. From that retrospect, the true Monster was the French Revolution, undoubtedly the one historical even why even the most hidebound reactionary will attempt to drape a coup as a return to Democracy. The American Revolution only looms now globally since somewhere around 1919, the US effectively became a superpower. Similarly, had the Russian Revolution not resulted in Stalin’s empire, it would be regarded as a minor skirmish. (History is never not contaminated by Presentism, if only because we cannot escape seeing it from our moment in time.)
I am not calling for anything in particular and certainly not more rigorously “materialist” analyses of culture and politics than those in Jacobin or n+1. And when theory travels, it does indeed illuminate some things about the Situation. The peril is taking that Map for the Territory. And clearly there is a long history of theory-inflected left taking Maps for Territories. Imagine if you will believing a country that had just elected Richard Nixon had just entered a Revolutionary Moment as the Maoist Weathermen certainly did. In fact, the country was much closer to said moment in 1919 or 1960. A certain amount of voluntarism is necessary for such moments to erupt, but the amount that is passed around then and now on the Left is willful.
What one comes away with is the necessity of a certain style of analysis. Editors of N+1 and the Jacobin have much more in common with Pitchfork than journals such as Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Village Voice in their early days. What they indulge in, mostly, is a matter of cool-hunting and hipster one-upmanship. There is good information, and actual reportage, of course. But it may be worth renovating their vocabulary (dip into Melville or Whitman?) or understanding that the post in postmodern is (as many theorists have insisted) postrevolutionary. Like the Scarecrow before he meets Dorothy, the Left (and I mean me as well) still are Hollow Men and Mistah Kurtz is dead.
Generation X exists! New Weezer album is the sound of our middle-aged middle-child syndrome | Salon.com
A collection of cheesy covers is the defining soundtrack of a generation so easily forgotten
— Read on www.salon.com/2019/01/24/generation-x-exists-new-weezer-album-is-the-sound-of-our-middle-aged-middle-kid-syndrome/
Trolling the Showbox
It may be the heat of the summer, but it turns out the threatened demolition of the nearly 80 year-old Showbox performance hall has given every resident of Seattle something to troll ever other resident. I have not checked, but I suspect there is trolling of Seattle going on about the Showbox, though the vote for and then repeal of the head tax probably took up most to space the national media reserves for Seattle snark. Erica Barnett, a freelance journalist and blogger even invited a former colleague to troll proponents of preserving the Showbox. In other words, yes, they got the old band back together in order to troll musical bands.
CM Sawant was not trolling the Council when she wrote a resolution which would have made the two blocks facing the Market (which include the Showbox) also landmarks. Sawant does not troll because she actually means what she says, but it was actually a savvy move to get other members of the planning committee to whittle it down to a compromise (just the Showbox is temporarily put under jurisdiction of the PDA that effectively manages the Market) that got an 8-0 vote. Perhaps though Savant was trolling the out of town developer. She did organize an action at Boeing that implored the multinational to become worker owned. As a trained economist, she knows that is not going to happen.
Those who call their opponents NIMBYs, or sometimes NIMBY-Trots* (ha ha, dude, you are not running away from that comment!) have been having a fine time trolling the Council, the rich musicians, and the middle-aged white people who can afford to see shows at the Showbox (this by the way is how those who are trolling against its preservation see fit to characterize those they troll; most of the local musicians who play or have played the Showbox are not rich, nor are all the shows solely for MAWPs). But their trolling has not been the loudest–it is not really strategic on their part to “stan” as the word has it for Onni and some anonymous owner(s) who are registered LLC in Nevada.
The source of some trolling is the $5 million that Onni would have to kick in to the affordable housing funds. That sum is significant enough that the folks who think MAWPs are always stopping the City from Doing the Most Important Thing Right Now are getting their lap tops to go to Facebook and Twitter to hassle their friends. It isn’t really the money, though. To put that sum into perspective, a recent affordable building went up in another neighborhood in Seattle. The church that sold the land to the City for the building had to sell at half the assessed value of $8 million. The building itself cost $40 million. You might think those who believe that there MITTDRN would be camping out at City Hall and Olympia asking for a state income tax if we need 10 Onni developments to get 400 units of affordable housing.
There is a stand-by trolling theme, which is that the City’s temporary halt via including the Showbox for 10 months in the PDA for the Market sets a “precedent”. The big worriers, the folks who believe that the City Council is the equivalent of the Kremlin and is just a vote away from taking all private property–yes people seem to believe this in a city that is one of the hottest housing markets in the country and in which several firms with the largest market caps do business–means that anyone could be subject. But wonkier types as well as trickle down lobbyists worry about the city becoming prey to law suits surrounding other zoning decisions. Now, every variance on an existing law or enactment of one sets a “precedent”. You may not see it, but this is the “slippery slope”. Myself, I would not be adverse to the Council placing every business district in the City under the PDA for a year, but that indeed would be a precedent. We need a few more of these actions for this decision to really be “unprecedented”. Like the first few times, It tweeted lies from the White House, we should have sat on our hands before we said, Hmm, this is unprecedented. Though given how fast that happened, the actions would have precedented by time we reacted.
I am not sure if it is trolling but the temporary halt to the demolition of the Showbox has also had those more inclined to social justice declaring their nonagreement.
*(all the Trots I know spend their time trying to hijack actions of other local organizations, because that is what Trots do besides telling you the Correct Line on the Spanish Civil War (even ex-Trots do this))
A Wide Margin 